Volume 5 - Number 3 Explore this issue

Spring 2025 Issue

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In the Spring 2025 issue: Yaroslav Hrytsak on the surprising lessons of setting the Ukrainian war in the context of history; David Bell asks if we shouldn’t still believe in the enlightenment; Durs Grünbein shares cautionary echoes in prose and poetry; Clifford Thompson argues for reviving an honest view of race; Alfred Brendel notes some of the ungenteel qualities of Papa Haydn; Agnes Callard investigates what we see when we look at colors; Enrique Krauze explains what happens when a hunger for power destroyed a democracy; James Traub investigates journalism’s tangled relationship with truth; Jaroslaw Anders makes a cautionary tale from the the trajectory of Polish poetry; Gary Saul Morson warns of the danger of ready-made beliefs, and Kenda Mutongi of the use and abuse of magical thinking; Celeste Marcus asks what the American Jew owes her country; Leon Wieseltier muses on the slumber, and slow destruction, of liberalism in America and Israel; and poetry from David Grossman, Paula Bohince, and Karl Kirchwey.

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It’s like a meteor of intelligent substance that landed on my desk.

Thomas L. Friedman

A triumph for freedom of thought.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Liberties sure is needed in these times.

Bill Maher

Liberty is under threat and Liberties girds us for the fight.

George Stephanopuolos

Something was missing in our culture, and here it is.

Tina Brown

Invaluable.

David Brooks

Liberties: Some serious food for thought.

Christiane Amanpour

Liberties is THE place to be.

Wynton Marsalis

A murderers row of important, fortifying, and inspiring writers.

Aaron Sorkin

Liberties opened my mind to subjects unfamiliar and points of view unexpected. I am hooked.

Ralph Fiennes

Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts — old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

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Liberties Sidebar

Mannhood: Democracy Dies in Daylight

by

May 2025

“The worst is over,” Thomas Mann wrote to Herman Hesse on December 22, 1932. “The madness seems to have passed its peak, and if we live long enough we shall witness happier days.” Mann was referring to the Nazi political threat and was of course soon proven sorely mistaken. And yet he actually had good...

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We Must Save The Books

by

May 2025

Two oceans can be said to defend the United States. There are also the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, outposts of security and pivot points on the U.S. Navy’s map of the world. The American territory not bounded by water is bordered by countries with no reason and no will to invade: Mexico,...

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Air Does Something To You: Interview With a Psychoanalyst

by

May 2025

Jamieson Webster treats psychoanalysis not as a static body of knowledge but as something to be tested, stretched, and reimagined. A practicing analyst, she is also a professor, writer, and public intellectual whose work pushes the field beyond the consulting room. She has collaborated with artists, written for general audiences, and even performed in plays....

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Flaneur: Turkey’s forgotten Social Democrat

by

April 2025

Even by the depressing standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, April 2002 was a hopeless time. The peace summits of the 1990s had faded to memory and scores of Palestinians and Israelis were regularly killed in terror attacks and military operations. The United States, which had exerted so much effort in the peace process, was by...

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Medium of Exchange

by

April 2025

I A penny  saved, heads-up, one, shiny buttercup, its tiny   face value sunned with luck such that you stoop to pluck   it—kids’ play, fair return  due— is a  penny earned.     II Money doesn’t drape herself on fair limbs, float her wealth of long stems—   green affair, lush, moss laces— put...

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What Harvard Didn’t Say

by

April 2025

Last week, Harvard challenged the Trump administration’s threat to deny billions in federal funds unless the university bent to a list of far-reaching demands. Harvard’s legal counsel struck a measured but unmistakably defiant tone: “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.” In a separate...

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Loyalty and Despotism Roundtable

by , , , , , , ,

April 2025

Last month, Liberties assembled a number of specialists on regions or communities plagued by despotic leaders for a conversation on Zoom. Respondents were asked to respond to the question “How do despots in your respective countries or in the regions and eras you study use loyalty as a tool to enforce obedience?” What follows is...

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Memories of Mario

by

April 2025

It was in Mexico City in 1990, at a conference organized by Octavio Paz to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from defeat in the Peruvian presidential elections, denounced Mexico as a “perfect dictatorship.” It was a shocking moment. The word ‘perfect’ said so clearly that the Mexican regime...

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Podcast

Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.

Salon Podcast

A monthly conversation during which Liberties Journals' Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus talk with dozens of their closest friends about a question of pressing philosophical concern.
DC SALON 13

Can We Learn To Be Alone?

Liberties Journal's associate publisher, managing editor, and sixty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can We Learn To Be Alone?" DC Salons are held monthly at the Liberties Offices in Washington, DC. Email [email protected] for more information.

DC SALON 12

Can People Change?

Christopher McCaffery, Celeste Marcus, and forty of their closest friends together ask and answer the question "Can People Change?"

Required Reading

On Required Reading we talk with writers and readers about the texts ��� old and new — that influence or express their worldview.
Ryan Ruby: Context Collapse

Ryan Ruby discusses his new book Context Collapse with Christopher McCaffery and Celeste Marcus.

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus Discuss Immigration under Trump

What will immigration look like over the next four years?

Jessica Pishko and Celeste Marcus discuss what immigration policies will look like in the next Trump administration.

View All Podcasts



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